Originally Posted by PabloEdvardo
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It was true on Green
Edit: In general, I agree with the sentiments in this thread that something needs to be done about p99 raiding and content progression.
Again and again we've been told that this isn't about creating a 1:1 forensic reproduction of classic everquest, but that some non-classic changes are because they want the game to give the classic experience when playing. Meaning, they want it to feel like you're playing in 1999 again.
I did NToV on Live across two servers, two "uber" guilds, and both of them did not pull the dragons. We would move them slightly within their lairs or pull them maybe down a hallway, but we weren't doing entrance pulls and kiteouts and trains. Rooting the dragons actually does bring the experience closer to what it was like on live. This is one example of how they've used non-classic changes to produce a classic experience.
So I also believe they need to strongly reconsider things like having multiple servers or raid content spawn rates or instancing. The number and intensity of raid guilds on these servers is unlike the majority of the experiences that players had on live. On live each server had raiding guilds which stuck to "their lane", and because new content was always coming out (new expansions, progression) rather than guilds competing for the top content, they progressed their members along the content and geared them up along the way. Once a player was geared through previous content in one guild, they would often leave and join the next guild up.
We see this a little bit in p99 with how guilds will be doing fear/hate in kunark while other guilds are chasing kunark dragons and VP, but once velious is reached and progression ends, the natural stratification of the guilds goes away completely.
In addition, p99 is extremely top-heavy when left to one server. Since 2-3 guilds on p99 all end up targeting the same "tier" of content, yet the spawn rates of the monsters is unaffected (and arguably even worse due to variances), players end up with a non-classic experience when it comes to loot availability. If on a Live server you only had maybe 100-150 players in an uber guild needing to be equipped on their mains, on p99 players often have 2 or more raiding level characters they regularly use, meaning with multiple guilds you might have 600-800 characters competing for the same drop availability.
Unlike Live when a guild would get every single spawn of specific bosses until they chose to progress past it, with competition on p99 guilds often get only a percentage of those kills.
All of this compounds into extremely low average loot availability for most players, and because progression dies at Velious, the top guilds never stop wanting Velious loot, and continue to farm it for years for their new members and alts, meaning other guilds are actually still actively prevented from progressing naturally to those bosses like they were in classic and kunark.
tl;dr is that more non-classic changes could do a lot to restore the classic raid experience on p99 instead of this completely non-classic competitive system with a fraction of the loot available per member
ideas like: get rid of variance, quadruple the spawn rate, add automated random weekly quakes, allow guild+character based instancing with lockouts, increase the number of items dropped per table, have multiple servers running the same timeline so you only have one uber guild per server, etc.
what we have today is NOT a classic experience, and this comes from someone who did progression raiding on live across multiple guilds, on two servers, and who also raided Green with a top guild, doing all the content
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